Last month I made a decision that will most likely change the shape of my career and future. I left an in house SEO/SEM position with a large corporation for a chance to join a small, venture capitalist backed start up.
My previous employer had provided me with a career path, challenging work and had noticed my unique talents. After eight months on the job as an Account Manager, I was promoted to leadership role, began participating in management strategy and product development meetings. I was on the fast track and excited about my future with the company.
With this opportunity I also got to see some of the negatives of working with a large corporation. As many of you know, the current economic climate does not provide businesses with an immense amount of time to make decisions. Decisions need to be made quickly and businesses need to adapt to their markets and their customers’ needs. Needless to say I was made aware of how slow and political things can be in a large corporation.
As the 2009 year ended, my team and I were informed we would be merging with our sister company and be relocating to Paramus, New Jersey in Q2 of 2010. (Who would want to live there?) I won’t get into the grimy details but this announcement accompanied by some other issues lead to me searching for a new opportunity.
I was fortunate enough to be exposed to the entrepreneurial mindset while taking an entrepreneurship class in Philadelphia University’s MBA program. The class was taught by the President of Philadelphia University, Stephen Spinelli, who also happened to be one of the founding fathers of Jiffy Lube. His passion for entrepreneurship and excitement about the start-up atmosphere inspired me and made me realize that my business acumen and drive may be a perfect fit for a start up.
I also have aspirations to eventually launch my own tech start up. Getting in on the ground level of a star-up would introduce me to the entrepreneurship culture, show me how a company goes about securing funding and hopefully introduce me to a network of cereal entrepreneurs.
So when I finally decided that I did not want to move up to Paramus, New Jersey I began reaching out to my network and using sites like StartUpHire.com to find opportunities with venture capitalist backed companies. I was hoping to find a company that was involved in search marketing or was in need someone to head up their search marketing efforts.
I was fortunate enough to stumble across a company, ClickEquations, moving from a full agency business model to a SAAS (software as a service) model. This piece of software enabled advertisers and agencies to manage paid search campaigns across multiple publishers. Along with that it offered extensive reporting and bid management tools. Ultimately I was pretty impressed.
But a lot more went into my decision to join the team at ClickEquations. As with any start up there is the chance the company or idea would fail and I would be out of a job in a few months. So I took a look at their software and compared it to their competitors. I studied their management team and their track records and saw this as not only a good company to work for but a company that had potential to grow exponentially.
So now I am one week deep in joining a start up and am excited to learn and grow. Hopefully this experience will teach me the ins and outs of a start-up so a few years from now I can begin the process of launching my own.
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